By Louis Muiruri
When I was growing up, the only form of lottery we knew was charity sweepstake. The lottery was heavily advertised via national radio, and when I came to Nairobi to join an institution of higher learning I was excited to see the concept in action.
It was based on a very basic model where the vendor positioned lottery ticket selling booths in various parts of the city. All you had to do was to walk to the booth and purchase a scratch-and-win ticket. The tickets came in various denominations from as low as twenty shillings to some higher amounts. I never bothered with the bigger denomination tickets because my upper threshold was twenty shillings that I could easily afford to put at risk and not mourn so much if I failed to win.
Low denomination wins were instant and the vendor would pay you on the spot, while the big wins were redeemable at their head office. The prospect of winning a million shillings was every young man’s dream, though the chances were diminished by the fact that the participating tickets were more expensive and far beyond the reach of a common young man.
The highest amount I ever won in the lottery was forty shillings that I promptly redeemed and ploughed back into buying two more tickets. I didn’t win for both tickets and walked back to the college hostels feeling downcast. Forty shillings could feed me for a week in the college canteen as it had meals as cheap as three shillings. I will not discuss the menu that was priced at three shillings because it was not food for human consumption. It was the equivalent of humanitarian aid that was supposed to keep you barely alive as you waited for the semester to end.
Ploughing a full week’s worth of money meant for food into a lottery was probably a precursor for bad financial decisions that I would probably make later in my college life.
I was walking downtown one day when I met this elderly woman who seemed to be stranded. She greeted me with humility and sought to take a few of my minutes to ask for a favor. As a student, I knew I did not go carrying around favors; therefore I had nothing to lose by listening to her. The worst she could do was to lure me into a backstreet clinic and harvest my internal organs, but even then I did not think harvesting the liver of a malnourished looking student was worth her hustle.
She explained to me that she had just won a lottery ticket for a million shillings but unfortunately could not redeem it because she had travelled from upcountry without her national identity card. She offered to sell the ticket to me at a modest amount of ten thousand shillings so that she could get fare back home (since she had spent all her money buying the winning ticket). The prospect of investing ten thousand shillings and multiplying it a hundred times in a minute was too inviting to trigger my caution.
She produced the winning ticket, and true to her word, the ticket had the three combinations of one million shillings that entitled me to claim the amount at the vendors head office.
My young mind started wandering even before I could make a decision. One million shillings would buy me a brand new Nissan B12 (that was the car in vogue then). Looking around I could already see shops offering discounts on Savco jeans, Chicago Bulls t-shirts and other merchandise that would soon grace my wardrobe.
I could already visualize myself moving from the filthy college ‘prefab’ hostels into more decent flats nearby where I would shower with hot water and have toilets with flushing water all the time. I would dispose of my electric coil that cooked most of my meals to a 3-burner cooker with an oven, and my breakfast would comprise of scrambled eggs, bacon and freshly brewed coffee.
As if by coincidence, we had just received our students’ allowance called ‘boom’. I had not carried all the money with me, but I managed to convince the lady to allow me one hour to rush back to the hostels to bring the full amount. She obliged, she must have been very desperate I assumed.
I almost flew to and from the hostels, and I did not even talk to my roommate lest he got wind of my scheme and probably got interested. He would know about it when I showed up in my car to pick my things and move out, I figured.
True to her word, I met the old lady in the same place that I had left her. I parted with the ten thousand shillings folded in crisp notes and the old lady thanked me profusely for saving her from spending a night in the lonely streets of Nairobi.
I found my way to the vendor’s head office though I got lost and ended up boarding multiple KBS buses. I arrived at the offices just as the security guard was closing the gate. I was panting and sweating profusely, but I argued that probably this would be the last time I would be pounding these streets like a migrating wildebeest.
When I presented the ticket, the receptionist asked me a few questions as she studied it with a keen eye. From the look on her face, my story sounded queer but familiar.
She was reasonable enough to take me aside and reveal to me that I had just been conned by the lady. She showed me the clever alterations done on the ticket to make it look like a winning ticket.
She warned me that I risked being arrested and charged with fraud if she escalated the matter to her seniors. As an act of good faith, she told me that I risked being linked to the cartel of conmen who were responsible for my current predicament, and I still had the option of quietly walking away and counting my losses.
It was my turn to eat humble pie. I thanked her from saving me from the jaws of arrest and possible incarceration in a maximum security prison. I walked back to the hostels with a splitting headache and a feeling that bordered on a suicidal tendency. That was going to be the hardest semester of my college life, and the only way I survived was by strict self-imposed austerity measures. Thus ended my short-lived engagement with lotteries.